Gamechangers

Failed assassination attempts, real and planned ahead

Portrait of a bullet by Doug Mills, The New York Times, via Reddit.

Interesting report in Washington Post (this was a gift link from Bluesky that worked for me) on the presidential election campaign in Hungary, where the fascistoid incumbent Viktor Orbán appears to be in serious trouble:

Officers from the [Russian] intelligence service, or SVR, suggested that drastic action might be necessary — a strategy they called “the Gamechanger.” In an internal report for the SVR obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post, the operatives proposed a way to “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign” — “the staging of an assassination attempt on Viktor Orban.”

You know what it made me think of.

I’ve never had any patience with the conspiracy theory of the assassination attempt on Trump of July 13 2024, because of all the uncontrollable variables: in the first place there really was a shooter, killed on the spot, of course, so his motives can never be investigated; the four seconds he was given before the local security team put him out of commission, he got off eight shots that hit either three or four people, killing Corey Comperatore and critically injuring two other audience members and probably grazing Trump’s right ear (the hardcore conspiracy theory holds that he or somebody with him was prepared with fake blood to smear on his ear after he dropped to the ground). I don’t see how the conspirators could have been certain that the shooter, who was clearly prepared to die on the spot, could be counted on to miss Trump, or that he could have come as close as he apparently did, if he didn’t intend to kill him. The astonishing photo by NYT’s Doug Mills showing a bullet flying toward Trump’s right ear could conceivably have been doctored, but that would have expanded the necessary number of conspirators beyond plausibility to include the forensic analysts who decided it was authentic and Mills himself.

That was the thing I’d been meaning to write about in the post on stochastic violence last December, but I never got around to it. It seemed like a particularly good example for my idea of emphasizing the role of chance in guessing where and when it’s going to happen, Butler County, Pennsylvania, offering some kind of exemplary case: relatively rural but part of the Greater Pittsburgh area, 92% white and overwhelmingly Republican, with a population of close to 200,000 but only two centers with populations over 10,000 (Butler, the only city, is 13,000 and shrinking). Not just rightwing but really homogeneous, a hard place for a boy to stand out if he’s not a talented athlete, a hard place for a teenager to find a job. Pittsburgh is 35 miles away. I don’t find any numbers on gun ownership but I hardly feel it’s necessary. There’s definitely hunting, for deer, squirrel, duck, and some say bear.

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Thomas Crooks, the shooter, son of a couple of professional counselors, was a 20-year-old from the much bigger town of Bethel Park, Allegheny County, in the opposite direction from Pittsburgh and close enough to be counted as a suburb. He’d graduated from high school with an excellent SAT score and three APs, had earned an associate’s degree at the county community college, and was planning to start four-year college in the fall, and he did have a job, at a nursing home near where he lived. He also belonged to a local gun club. Disquieting facts from his youth included reports that he was bullied, over low social status, body odor, and a habit of going to school in camo hunting outfits, and had been identified as perpetrator of an anonymous bomb threat phoned into the high school when he was a freshman, for which he doesn’t seem to have been punished.

His interest in politics was wavering, and not strongly partisan, though he registered as a Republican when he turned 18, but also had contributed $15 to an ActBlue project, the Progressive Turnout Project, the year before that. His online behavior included searches for the whereabouts and activities of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, the Democratic and Republican national conventions, as well as Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray, and the Princess of Wales, and questions about major depressive illness, and the 2021 high school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, downloading a photo of that shooter, Ethan Crumbley. He owned an AR-15 his father had bought legally for himself in 2013 and legally given him in 2023. The father himself later said his Thomas had been showing signs of depression since his community college graduation. His social media comments were sometimes anti-immigrant and antisemitic and seemed to “espouse political violence”, quoting Mao Zedong’s saying that “Power grows from the barrel of a gun.” On July 6, the day he registered for the Trump rally, he asked Google, “How far was Oswald from Kennedy.”

From a really cold analytic standpoint, the most interesting thing is how well he fits the profile for two apparently quite different kinds of of stochastic violence, the school shooting and the political assassination, illustrating my idea that the two are actually very similar, products of a violence-favoring cultural atmosphere, not so much political ideological hate speech as the famousness of shooters, of a certain kind of isolation and hopelessness from which a young man suffers, and the availability of a semi-automatic weapon. Crooks could easily have gone to his high school instead, but the 2024 presidential campaign came around instead, and he could just as easily have gone after Biden, or Kamala Harris, if he’d lived long enough to see her nominated a week later and if she’d traveled to his neck of the woods. It’s the gun that played the most important role.

I do have an idea the thing really did inspire the SVR to its idea on Orbán’s behalf. Not that it really was a “gamechanger”, in the event, though I don’t want to dive at all into the question of why Trump won—I continue to believe, as I said at the time, that the 2024 election was more a muddle than anything else, with a lot of influence from Elon Musk’s money focused on those same Rust Belt states but not any kind of brilliant strategy, just pouring it on, and perhaps the consultants’ caution putting a damper on the most effective tools Harris and Walz had.

Orbán’s opposition in the Tisza party (officially center-right, but focused on restoring rule of law, combating corruption, renewing relationships with the EU with a more moderate stance on immigration, restarting the economy and increasing social spending), led by the very Hungarian-named Péter Magyar, continues well ahead in the polls for the general election, an indication for us in the US that Orbán-style constitutional dictatorship does have a sell-by date, and that’s something I needed to hear. This story about Russian efforts to keep him in office isn’t going to help—Russian interference in Hungarian politics is already a pretty big issue:

On March 6, VSquare, a Hungarian investigative news outlet, reported that a team of Russian military intelligence agents was deployed to interfere in the election. A few days later, the Financial Times reported that a Kremlin-linked operation sought to flood Hungarian social media with messages to boost Orbán’s sagging popularity.

Last Saturday, the Washington Post issued a report citing EU security officials who accused Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó of routinely providing Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with details from top-level EU meetings. The newspaper quoted an official saying Szijjártó even called Lavrov during EU summits to provide “live reports” on internal discussions, effectively giving Moscow a “seat at the table.”

Viktor Orbán looking the way I hope he feels, at an EU summit in Brussels a couple of weeks ago,.AP photo by Geert Vanden Wijingaert, via.